dmd platform support - poll

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sat Dec 27 21:12:48 PST 2008


"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:gj6mds$28iv$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Ah ha, there's that usual "if you go and buy a PC" catch. Which begs the 
>> question, why would I? My existing system does everything I need it to do 
>> perfectly fine. And since I'm not petty enough to allow anyone to shame 
>> me into buying a new system just by calling my *current* system "legacy", 
>> that leaves no real reason for me to buy a new one.
>
> I agree that often there is little incentive to upgrade. In particular 
> incentive can be negative when it comes to Vista vs. XP.
>

I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus 
suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. But yea, that 
alone isn't enough to balance out the reasons against upgrading.

> [snip]
>>> so supporting 64bit is just supporting the current technology. it's not 
>>> about fancy servers or anything like that, just supporting the current 
>>> standards. that's a minimun that should be expected from any compiler 
>>> implementation nowadays.
>>> b) even though for now there is a compatability mode in most OSes, why 
>>> would I want to limit the performance and abilities of my PC to old 
>>> technology which is being faded away?
>>>
>>
>> Even in 32-bit "legacy" mode, 64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway.
>
> Talk about adding insult to injury. This is a rather random statement to 
> make. Really, browsing the Web, writing documents, or writing emails is 
> all you want from a computer? I'd say, until computers are not at least 
> potentially capable of doing most intellectual tasks that people do, we're 
> not in the position to say that computers are fast enough. When seen from 
> that perspective, computers are absurdly slow and scarce in resources. The 
> human brain's capacity bypasses our largest systems by a few orders of 
> magnitude, and if we want to claim doing anything close, we should at 
> least have that capacity. But even way, way before that, any NLP or speech 
> recognition system that does anything interesting needs days, weeks, or 
> months to train on computer clusters, when it all should run in real time. 
> Please understand that from that perspective the claim that computers are 
> plenty fast and memory is plenty large is rather shortsighted.
>

When a reasonably-priced computer comes around that can actually do those 
sorts of things, I may very well be finally enticed to upgrade. But like you 
said, as it stands right now, even the high-end stuff can't do it. So it's 
really a non-issue for now. 





More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list